Friday, January 16, 2009

Books on Books

After finishing my post about People of the Book, I realized that I read quite a few books that are about books, booksellers and libraries. Here are a few of the ones worth checking out (pun intended) ...

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly -- An evil fairy tale world which houses a powerful book.The Meaning of Night: A Confession by Michael Cox -- A childhood friendship goes bad with the theft of a book and turns even worse with the theft of a legacy.The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde -- Thursday Next has the ability to travel into books and must save Rochester and Jane Eyre from a real world villain ... luckily this one is the first in a whole series of book travel novels.The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte -- A fast-paced mystery about the ruthless worlds of book collecting and Satanism.Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling -- A diary that writes back when you write in it and brainwashes Ginny Weasley into doing very bad things.The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon -- A young man follows a trail of ashes and tears as he tries to discover who is burning all of Julian Carax's books.The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield -- An older author invites a young author to her home and reveals her long held secrets to her in hopes of finding a sympathetic mind before the end of her life.The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester -- A non-fiction book about one of the main contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, an asylum inmate.

Two fiction books about books that I liked a lot were Daphne by Justine Picardie (about Daphne Du Maurier, the Brontes, and JM Barrie) and Possession by AS Byatt (old poetry manuscripts).

For nonfiction, I loved Michael Dirda's Classics for Pleasure (truly a book about books--profiles of good, sometimes unexpected classics). And on a different note, there are AJ Jacobs's books The Know It All (reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica) and The Year of Living Biblically (reading and attempting to follow the entire Bible).